Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

They’ve given me too many headaches…

I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn’t.

Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven’t done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to ‘get’ it yet.

Or mutable constants…

A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They’ll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.

The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it…and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.

Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people’s lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you’ll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.

Part of that is just experience. We’ve lived though a few ‘revolutions’ for which the net effect was…arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they’re bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn’t there before.

And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn’t there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.

“No, wait, it’s not what you think! There’s a continuous integration system, a commit would’ve triggered a new build! It might have paged the oncall! Babe! The test suite has been flaky lately!”

Well this is a blast from the past. I can’t even load the context anymore.

I was engaged in an argument, and staying focused on the argument instead of getting sidetracked by semantics. But anyway, you claimed “it’s not ad hominem, he said you were wrong therefore you are stupid!” That rests on the assumption that I was wrong, so I was assuming that was your assertion.

I think. This was, after all, months ago, and apparently the account I was arguing with got deleted or something?

For real? You’re really suggesting that anybody who says they’re for free speech is actually a fascist pedophile?

IOW you’ve turned it into a thought-terminating cliche.

I’m…not sure you’re really in sync with a lot of the people here. I’m 100% in favor of all of that, which I would just call healthy capitalism.

I guess I’m reacting to other conversations I’ve had today. A lot of people with Mao banners and Che Guevara profile pics, calling for the total overthrow of capitalism.

If people are just talking about capitalism with accountability, hell, sign me up.

Fair enough. I know Achilles’ and Patroclus’ affair has been discussed for more than a century.

I subbed to Reddit’s community on this topic (SapphoAndHerRoommate?) out of curiosity, and it struck me at some point that none of the examples posted were historians denying the possibility of historical figures being gay. So at some point I actually went through like 3 pages of the top stories…like 50+% were tweets saying basically “Boy, those historians sure do like to pretend gay people don’t exist! Imagine them pretending Achilles and Patroclus were just buds lol!” Seriously most of them were specifically about A&P.

Then another 30% or so were religious fundamentalists posting complaints about how people were trying to queer up history.

There were a handful of historians saying “hey guys, gender roles were different back then, it may not be accurate to label a history figure ‘gay’ even if they did have male lovers”

Then there were like 3-4 quotes from popular biographies from the 1800s that used funny language about “never married” and “lifelong friends”.

And finally there was one article from the BBC about two dudes from the Roman period in Britain who were buried in an embrace, and it was like “What could their relationship have been? We can only speculate…maybe they were both apprentices?” or something. It was pretty egregious. Maybe a historian was involved in that.

Anyway, that was one example in the 60 or so top stories. It seems like a meme that just keeps on going even though it’s been obsolete for a century.

Yeah. And it’d be pretty stupid to say of most adults "You don’t agree with me? Must be because you never read a book before.

As opposed to what?

Jesus Christ returning and establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth? Yeah, capitalism is probably worse.

Compared to Soviet Communism? Way better.

When people say “we need to stop capitalism”, do they mean add some new regulations? Or do they mean overthrowing society and replacing it with some as-yet-completely-nebulous leftist system? Cuz, like, I could get on board with the first one. But the second, or variations thereof, are downright ridiculous.

As bad as it is in many ways, it’s better for the environment. There’s less actual consumption.

There’s a certain strain of Leftism that sees that people are taking the climate crisis seriously, so they’re like “Oh shit, it’s my chance to make good! If you care about the environment, you gotta give me shit! Capitalism is bad for the environment, and the opposite of capitalism is money in my pocket, let’s get going!”

It’s purely self-serving.

Certain strawman historians…

I’ve been reading and studying for decades, and yet somehow your worldview remains inconsistent and incoherent to me.

I’m sure it’s my fault.

Careful! By including more of the world in the Global South, you’re gonna start seeing more and more thriving capitalist countries, which kinda underlines my initial point.

You know that Hong Kong (occupied by the evil British!) provided the inspiration for Deng Xiaoping’s U-turn? Now it’s a joke to call China communist, and it’s GDP per capita looks like this…

Yes, Britain is capitalist these days. No, it was not a modern capitalist society in the 1700s–or at least, it was only just emerging. India was given to the East India Company by edict of the King.

Maybe spend the time to minimally educate yourself on the subject you’re attempting to debate here instead of opining about things you very clearly don’t have any clue about? The fact that you think communism could ever work in the real world is just the cherry on top.

Oh, huh! I didn’t know it worked like that! If I had, I could’ve just pointed out that you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about and have a cartoonish worldview, and I could have avoided all the trouble of making actual arguments. That’s so much easier!

You called me clueless based on a single sentence in an attempt to dismiss what I said. I didn’t use ‘ad hominem’ wrong, lol.